Irpin', storie di guerra e di resilienza - Stories of war and resilience

A photographic exhibition dedicated to Ukraine two years after the start of the war. On the second anniversary of the Russian invasion, which took place on the night of 23-24 February 2022, the Special Superintendence of Rome turns the spotlight on the daily horrors of the conflict with a free exhibition at the Drugstore Museum, an “atypical” museum open to contamination between the arts and located in a 1960s commercial building that preserves the remains of imperial tombs of the Portuense necropolis.

Curated by Special Superintendent Daniela Porro, Drugstore Museum director Alessio De Cristofaro and archaeologist and poet Marcello Tagliente, the exhibition is introduced by a shot of the presidential palace in Kyiv protected with sandbags. The image framed by the camera lens of Massimo Listri, a master of architectural and environmental photography, is the first symbolic stage of the reportage realized by Simone Proietti Marcellini and Antonio Romano of the Gaze Collective in Irpin’, one of the cities hit by the fury of war at the beginning of the conflict.

The six stories narrated by as many photographic sequences offer a glimpse into the lives of civilians in war by letting visitors into the homes of Tatyana, Oleksander, Oksana, Lyudmila, Inna and Svitlana and giving voice to the protagonists of many micro-stories made up of pain, separation, resilience, fear but also hope. The exhibition also features large-scale photographs depicting the effects of the war on the city, interspersed with poems by contemporary Ukrainian authors, selected by Marcello Tagliente.

Enriched at weekends by meetings and in-depth discussions with the participation of the Ukrainian association CreAttiva APS and Italian and Ukrainian scholars and artists, the exhibition invites us not to forget what is happening just a short distance away and to keep our attention focused on the rights to life, freedom, peace and self-determination of peoples.